Bouncers – or ‘door supervisors’ – are a pillar of the ‘British night out’. They can sneak you into an exclusive club or send your teeth skating across the pavement with their Wreck-It Ralph fists. They can take a selfie with you and call you ‘mate’ or they can hit on your sister and emasculate you on your 19th birthday. We’ve all tried to sneak past them, to argue with them, to convince them that your best friend ‘is like that normally’ and ‘definitely not throwing up in his mouth right now’. We’ve all tried to high-five them. We’ve all been scared of them. We’ve all seen them hit a posh bloke called Hugo for saying ‘My daddy can buy this place.’
But there is such a thing as the ‘bad bouncer’: the bouncer who is prone to violence, to fits of rage. This is the bouncer who is predisposed to picking you up by the armpits and launching you through the nearest available window. This is the bouncer who undergoes a Gollum-esque metamorphosis each time they wrap the security armband around their freakishly large bicep. This is the bouncer with the goatee and the teardrop tattoo who calls you ‘bud’ and slaps you on the back of the neck when you walk into the club. I hate this bouncer.
Bad bouncers are a result of bad standards
Just last week, I came face to face with yet another hypermasculine freakazoid wearing the Security Industry Authority (SIA) badge of approval. I was at a fancy black-tie ball where every guy had a story about Guinness and was over 6’4” – which made me look like a portly used car salesman in comparison. At around 12:30 a.m. – just as the party was petering out and the taps in the Portaloo had stopped working – I removed my bow tie. Like a hungry peregrine falcon spotting a fat little vole, the bouncer was upon me within seconds. ‘Put your bow tie back on now!’ he spat, shoving his face into mine. In another life, we might have kissed. I tried to explain that the party was over and that I was leaving, but my garbled response fell on deaf ears. This was his moment. He’d chosen me. I was his target.
‘Bad bouncers’ love to pick on one person when the night has been slow. This one was Patrick Swayze in Road House, and I was some unsuspecting background actor about to get a karate kick to the head. When another bouncer joined – this one as stout as a Smeg fridge – I gave up. After a very stunted back and forth, I redid my bow tie into a rudimentary X-shape and made my way towards the taxi rank.
On the ride back to my Premier Inn, I began to wonder: How do these jumped-up meatheads get a job?
I’ve worked with plenty of bouncers over the years. Some were genuine, level-headed professionals – some were not. I’ll change their names for legal reasons. There was Pete, who spent years behind bars for gang-related crimes (Guy Ritchie would have had a field day). Pete once showed me a video of himself headbutting two guys and using a tactical pen to destroy what little brain cells they had left. There were the Beavis and Butt-Head duo, who spent more time asking the staff for cups of chamomile tea than watching the door. There was Brian, the alcoholic punter-turned-bouncer who worked at the pub in order to pay off his tab. In the end, he quit and started a new tab at a different pub. There was Timmy, the retired boxer with the titanium skull, who got kicked in the testicles by another bouncer and started a large-scale brawl on shift. There was Mikey, the old cockney man who claimed he had shagged over 500 women, which is an unnerving figure. There was the meek kid who looked about 12 years old and whispered so quietly that you had to press your ear against his lips to hear him. I loved these guys (some of them), but they were terrible bouncers.
Where do these ‘bad bouncers’ come from? The hiring process certainly has something to do with it. From January 2017 to December 2023, the Security Industry Authority (SIA) licensed 111,790 door supervisors who could not complete a checkable five-year history. A further 2,929 could not ‘complete a criminal record check for the countries in which they resided’. Does that mean that the bouncer at my local watering hole wasn’t lying when he said he used a Sainsbury’s bag to ‘strangle a guy’ who called Mrs. Brown’s Boys ‘dangerously unfunny’? I hope not. But it does mean that a shocking number of licensed door supervisors might be unfit to do their job.
Bad bouncers are a result of bad standards. It’s one thing to have an unqualified bartender, but it’s another to have an unqualified bouncer. The SIA’s website talks about rigorous training and background checks, but it only takes one Friday night trip to Shoreditch to see just how bad the ‘bad bouncers’ can be.
Bouncing is a hard job, and not every bouncer is a bad one. Most of the time, they’re there to keep the peace, to stop Larry Redface McPolo Shirt from shivving you in the liver. They’re there to stop potential drink spikers and de-escalate acrimonious situations. They’re a preventive and corrective measure. But when the people who are hired to protect you can no longer do their job, it might be time to reassess who you’re hiring. Or don’t. Either way, I’m never taking my bow tie off again – not even if it’s 58°C and the party ended three hours ago.
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